20 S.H. Scott, A Westmorland Village: The Story of the Old
Homesteads and "Statesman " Families of Troutoech by Windermere
(Westminster, 1904), 21. A statesman whose papers survive in the
Cumbria Record Office at Kendal was Benjamin Browne of
Westmorland (1664-1748).

21 Paul Brassley, "Northumberland and Durham," in Thirsk, ea.,
Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. 5, Part I, 49.

30 The evidence supports the McDonalds' conclusions that
comparatively few Germans migrated more than 300 miles from
Philadelphia. See McDonald and McDonald, "Commentary," 134. Other
scholars have replicated these results. John Campbell (The
Southern Highlander, 63) concluded from surnames in pension
lists, muster rolls and census tracts that in North Carolina and
Tennessee, the English and Scots-lrish were each about one-third
of the population; in Kentucky, the English were 40% and the
Scots- lrish 80%; in Georgia, English and Scotslrish were each
about 40% of all names. He reckoned that Germans accounted for
one- fifth of names in North Carolina, one-seventh in Tennessee
and one-twelfth in Kentucky. Even this estimate overcounts the
number of Germans. H. Roy Merrens (Colonial North Carolina in the
Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1964), 53-81) reckons that
Germans were between 2.8 and 4.7% of the population of North
Carolina as a whole, but 22.5% of two counties near the Moravian
Tract.

31 Bridenbaugh, who thought of them as Scotch-lrish, wrote, "Of
all the national groups the Scotch Irish were the most numerous,
and it is not surprising that in the long run they came to
dominate" the backcountry. McDonald and McWhiney thought of them
as Celts and concluded that they were dominant in North Carolina,
South Carolina, and other settlements to the south and west. See
Bridenbaugh, Myths and Realities, 132; McDonald and McDonald,
"Ethnic Origins," 199; idein, "Commentary," 133; Schaper,
Sectionalism in South Carolina, 43; Mitchell, "Upper Shenandoan
Valley," 218.

32 Some called it "the frontiers" in the conventional 18th-
century sense of a boundary between governments--a very different
meaning from the Turnerian usage. An exception was Benjamin
Franklin, who developed his own frontier thesis before 1760.

35 An early description of backcountry speech ways so early as to
capture the language of the immigrants who had arrived in the
18th century was made by the American traveler Anne Royall, after
a visit to the region which she fancifully called "Grison
republic," and is now the state of West Virginia:
"To return to my Grison republic," she wrote, "their dialect sets
orthography at defiance, and is with difficulty understood; for
instance, the words by, my, rye, they pronounce as you would ay.
Some words they have imported, some they have made out and out,
some they have swapped for others, and nearly the whole of the
English language is so mangled and mutilated by them, that is
hardly known to be such. When they would say pretence, they say
lettinon is a word of very extensive use amongst them. It
signifies a jest, and is used to express disapprobation and
disguise; 'you are just lettinon to rub them spoons Polly is not
mad, she is only lettinon.' Blaze they pronounce bleez, one they
call waun, sugar shugger; 'and is this all it ye got?'
handkerchief hancorchy, (emphasis on the second syllable); and
'the two ens of it comed loose'; for get out of the way, they
say, get out of the road: Road is universally used for way; 'put
them cheers, (chairs) out of the road.' But their favorite word
of all, is hate, by which they mean the word thing; for instance,
nothing, 'not a hate not wann hate will ye's do.' What did you
buy at the stores ladies? 'Not a hate well you hav'nt a hate here
to eat.' They have the hickups, and corp, (corpse), and are a
(cute) people. Like Shakespeare they make a word when at a loss:
scawin'd is one of them, which means spotted." Anne Royall,
Sketch of the History, Life and Manners in the United States (New
Haven, 1826), I, 53; for other early descriptions of this dialect
see "Skitt," [H. E. Taliaferro], Fisher's Rover (North Carolina)
Scenes and Characters (New York, 1859); and Ralph Steele Boggs,
"North Carolina Folktales . . . ,"JAF47 (1934), 268-88.

38 Honey as a term of endearment was also occasionally heard in
New England and the Chesapeake. But it was specially associated
with North British and Irish speech, and in the 18th century came
to be regarded as an "hibernianism."

39 J. H. Combs, "Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the
Southern Mountains," DN 4 (1913-17), 283-97; Thomas Pyles, The
Origins and Development of the English Language (New York, 1964).

40 W. Dickson, Glossary of Words and Phrases Pertaining to the
Dialect of Cumberland (London, n.d.); see also an anonymous
compilation, Westmorland and Cumb~ land Dialects, Dialogues,
Poems, Songs ~ Ballads by Various Writers in the Westmorland and
Cumbe land Dialect Now Collected with a Copious Clossary (London,
1839); and see W. Dickinson and E. W. Prevost, A Glossary of the
Words and Phrases Pertaining to the Dialect of Cumberland
(London, 1879); and Ann Wheeler, Westmorland Dialect . . .
(London, 1840), 130. Also valuable are writings in dialect by the
18th century "Cumberland Bard," Robert Anderson. Early
descriptive sources are more helpful for an historian's purposes
than 20th-century speech studies, which, though more refined in
their analytic tools, are less useful as a guide to past
patterns.

Patterns of grammar were also very much the same. Hughes notes,
for example, that the borderers "used the indefinite article
freely, e.g., 'he had a one."' See Hughes, North Country Life in
the Eighteenth Century: The North East, 37. An example of the
Northumbrian double negative appears in Fraser, Steel Bonnets,
72.

41 Ferguson, Northmen in Cumberland and Westmorland, 152-53; see
also Dickinson and Provost, A Glossary of the Words and Phrases
Pertaining to the Dialect of Cumberland, xxv.

43 See H. B. Shurtleff, The Log Cabin Myth (Cambridge, Mass.,
1939). Log houses of various types appeared at an earlier date
throughout the colonies, often for special purposes such as forts
and jails and garrison houses, where walls of unusual thickness
were desired. Instances appear in the Archives of Maryland, 11
(1884), 224; North Carolina Colonial Records, I (1886), 300.

47 Leyburn has collected impressive evidence of continuities in
the vernacular architecture of the Scottish lowlands, quoting
Froissart in the 15th century that "after an English raid, the
country-folk made light of it, declaring they had driven their
cattle into the hills, and that with six or eight stakes they
would soon have new houses."

Of the 16th century, MacKenzie wrote that throughout Galloway,
cottages and cabins were "constructed of rude piles of
[drift]wood, with branches interwoven between them, and covered
on both sides with a tenacious mixture of clay and straw."

A report in 1670 noted that "the houses of the commonalty are
very mean, mud-wall and thatch, the best; but the poorer sort
live in such miserable huts as never eye beheld.... In some
parts, where turf is plentiful, they build up little cabins
thereof, with arched roofs of turf, without a stick of timber in
it; when the house is dry enough to burn, it serves them for
fuel, and they remove to another."

Of the 18th century it was written that the houses were "little
removed from hovels with clay floors, open hearths . . . only the
better class of farmers had two rooms, the house getting scant
light by two tiny windows."

Leybunn, The Scotch-lrish: A Social History, 18; P. Hume Brown,
Earl7 Travelers in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1891), 12-16; William
Mackenzie, History of Galloway from the Earliest Period to the
Present Time (2 vole., Kirkcudbright, 1841), I, 232; Harkian
Miscellany, Vl, 139; H. G. Graham, The Social Life of Scotland in
the Eighteenth Century (London, 1899), 182-83.

48 Woodmason, Carolina Backcountry, 31; William Byrd, The London
Diary (1717-1721) and Other Wntings (New York, 1958), 588-89;
Edmund Morgan, Virginians at Home (New York, 1952), 73; similar
observations were made two centuries later of Appalachian
families in industrial cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.

67 Yasukichi Yasuba, Birth Rates of the White Population in the
Uni¨ed States, 1800-1860 (Baltimore, 1962), 61-62, 131-32; Colin
Forster and G.S.L. Tucker, Economic Opportunity and White
American Fertility Ratios, 1800-1860 (New Haven, 1972), 40-41;
for the persistence of large and complex households in this
region during the nineteenth century, see William M. Selby,
Michael J. O'Brien and Lynn M. Snyder, "The Frontier Household,"
in Michael J. O'Brien, ea., Grassland, Forest and Historical
Settlement (Lincoln, Neb., 1984), 266-316. There is evidence of
large &mikes in Ulster, with as many as five males each on the
average; see Raymond Cillespie, Colonial Ulster: The Settlement
of East Ulster, 1600-1641 (Cork, 1985), 55.

75 David Ramsey, History of South Carolina from Its First
Settlement in 1670 to the Year 1808 (2 vole., Charleston,
1809),11, 600.

76 Mark Kaplanoff obtained the following estimates of mean age at
marriage from an ingenious analysis of the South Carolina census
of 1800, for marriages contracted in the population living at
that time.

Source: Unpublished research, communicated by the kindness of
Mark Kaplanoff.

77 1n England before 1750, mean age at first marriage of women
was 26.9 in twenty-six southern parishes, and 23.5 in sixteen
northern parishes. Age at marriage was generally higher in all
British regions than in the American colonies, but relative
differences were much the same. See Michael W. Flinn, The
European Demographic System, 1500-1820 (Baltimore, 1981), 124-25.

79 John Oldmixon also wrote that, throughout the backlands, "the
ordinary women take care of cows, hogs, and other small cattle,
make butter and cheese, spin cotton and flax, help to sow and
reap corn, wind silk from the worms, gather fruit and look after
the house"; The History of the British Empire in America in
Alexander S. Salley, Jr., Narratives of Early Carolina (I 911,
New York, 1967), 372.

91"lt is customary yet in some parts of the north of England to
place a plate filled with salt on the stomach of a corpse after
death." Charles Hardwick, Traditions, Superstitions and Folklore
(London, 1872), 181; see also Lowry C. Wimberly, Death and Burial
Lore in the English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Lincoln, Neb.,
Univ. of Nebraska Studies in Language, Literature and Criticism,
no. 8, 1927).

92 William Rollinson, Life and Tradition in the Lake District
(London, 1974), 56.